Foothill and Castlewood: large parcels on the hill, where the gate at the road is the first lock and the last one anybody services

The gate at the road is where these calls start, and the split matters before anybody drives out. The operator, its motor, its arm, the loop in the driveway and the wiring back to the house belong to a gate company. The metal is ours: the pedestrian gate beside the vehicle leaf, the cylinder or padlock on it, the keeper the bolt is supposed to land in, and the key that nobody has been able to find for two years. The usual state of a hillside property is a vehicle gate that works fine on its remote and a walk-through gate next to it that has not locked since the last owner. Realigning the leaf and keeper and fitting a cylinder or padlock keyed to the house runs inside $132–$352, and the old hardware comes off with you watching.

Walk one of these parcels with a notebook before calling, because the number of locks is never the number anybody remembers. Front entry, a door from the kitchen onto the side path, a slider onto the terrace, the service door into the garage, the pedestrian gate at the road, a gate into the back yard, a shed or pump house, and often a room over the garage with a lock of its own. Seven and eight are ordinary totals. When a parcel changes hands, each of those is a lock somebody who no longer lives there may still carry a key for. That is why the figure is $34–$52 per cylinder rather than a price per house, with everything after the first at the low end, and why five minutes of counting turns a guess into a real number.

Distance behaves differently up here than people expect. Twenty-four minutes is the honest run, and it is longer than the flat city because the last stretch is narrow road that doubles back rather than because of the mileage. You hear that number on the phone instead of discovering it on the driveway. Addresses are hard to read on these roads after dark, so name what marks the mouth of the driveway — a mailbox cluster, a retaining wall, a gate — and which side of the road it sits on, and leave a light on at the road if you can. If a gate crosses the drive, say whether it is working and who can open it right now, because that is the piece that stretches a run more than the climb does.

The rest is ordinary work at ordinary figures. A house lockout is $134–$255 with the $89 call-out inside it, $52 added between eight at night and midnight, $94 between midnight and seven in the morning, all counted into the total before the van moves, with identification checked at the step. Where a door has been forced, the jamb goes back together through to the stud and a strike takes long screws into framing at $181–$472, itemized for a claim. Long ownership on these parcels also means safes: a wall or floor safe left behind by a previous owner opens at $216–$570 and is reset afterward to a number you choose. Ninety days on the labor, on the receipt.